Friday

Down side to Soda (one of the many)


In the latest bad news for the soda industry, Danish researchers discovered that drinking non-diet soda leads to dramatic increases in fat buildup around your liver and your skeletal muscles, both of which can contribute to insulin resistance and diabetes. The study revealed that people who drank a regular soda every day for six months saw a 132 to 142 percent increase in liver fat, a 117 to 221 percent jump in skeletal fat, and about a 30 percent increase in both triglyceride blood fats and other organ fat. Their consumption also led to an 11 percent increase in cholesterol, compared with the people who drank other beverages such as water or milk.

Saturday

Aspartame

There's conflicting evidence regarding the safety of aspartame, a common chemical sweetener used in diet soda and other low-cal foods, but some people report headaches or generally feeling unwell after ingesting anything containing the chemical. To make life easier for everyone, this is one instance where you may want to follow the "better safe than sorry" principle. That's because a University of Liverpool test-tube study found that when mixed with a common food color ingredient, aspartame actually became toxic to brain cells.

Aspartame is used in many diet sodas, and researchers are finding that drinking two diet sodas a day can lead to a 500 percent greater increase in waist size. Furthermore, animal studies suggest that aspartame actually increases blood glucose levels similarly to sugar, which could explain the association between diet soda and diabetes.